why did McCain suggest that Obama goes to Denny's with Ayers??

[grasswire]

Is that a racist remark? Denny's has a long and controversial relationship with America's black community.

So why is McCain snarking about how Obama goes to Denny's and gets a "grand slam" meal??

[orestes]

1. Whats the history with Denny's you're talkin about?

Short version is fine

[lligrd]

2. Lawsuits Regarding Service For Blacks nt

[BrklynLiberal]

4. Therre were many stories about Denny's giving black customers a hard time....

http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/040602/nat_0406020065.shtml

[FrenchieCat]

7. Denny's used to make Black people pay up front,

while everyone else got their tabs after their meals like in normal restaurants.

They were sued, and lost.

[TTUBatfan2008]

8. Holy shit...

That is awful. How recent is that? I was born in '85. A lot of this shit really pisses me off because my generation for the most part is living MLK's Dream.

[4lbs]

10. I remember hearing about the Denny's issue regarding African-Americans.

I believe it was in the early 1990s and involved Denny's restaurants in the poorer urban areas.

Some of the Denny's restaurants would make their African-American patrons pay for the meal upfront before it was delivered to their table, while "white" patrons were allowed to pay after they ate, as normal.

The reason cited was that these particular Denny's restaurants were experiencing a high rate of "dine-and-dash" tactics, and they stated that the great majority of such offenders were African-American.

In addition, other Denny's restaurants would suspiciously make their African-American customers wait much longer to be seated and served compared to "white" patrons. There was a case where six black Secret Service agents entered a Denny's and waited an hour to be seated while "white" patrons who arrived much later, sometimes 30 or 40 minutes later, would be seated within just a few minutes.

[TTUBatfan2008]

11. Discrimination occurs in many forms these days...

Any time my sister and I are with my parents, they always seat us in the sections with parents who have little kids. My sister is 25 and I'm about to be 23, yet these restaurants treat us like we're kids. My mom always gets that angry tone to her voice but attempts to politely ask the host/hostess to seat us in the actual adult section. I remember when we were in high school, one time we went to TGI Friday's during the summer without our parents and the waiter was a total asshole to us. They assume of course that teenagers won't tip worth a damn so they decide to give poor service. The jerk took twice as long to give us our food as the people who sat down 15 minutes after we did. I'm glad Denny's got their asses sued for that behavior. It's just wrong on so many levels.

[GrizzlyMan]

16. Bad tables are something we have in common

My wife and I are white, but we seem to be magnets for the tables by the kitchen door or beverage stations or even worse next to a party of 15 who has the same server.She lets it go but it drives me nuts. I don't know why this happens. We are normal looking Joe Blow suburban types. I chalk it up to bad luck.

[TTUBatfan2008]

17. That sounds like bad luck indeed...

We always get put right in the "family" section with screaming toddlers. I will admit that both my sister and I look younger than we are, but still, it's absolutely ridiculous to place a family of 4 people who all look at least say 18 years old in a section with a bunch of screaming kids. It's a subconscious thing I guess. They see a family and automatically compartmentalize the family with every other family that's been in the restaurant recently. The ageism thing is pretty disturbing to me as a young person. People talk about ageism towards older people but I think it's far worse coming from older people towards younger people. We are automatically assumed to be worthless in their view.

[Berry Cool]

30. Some restaurant staff get pissed off and mistreat you on purpose because they're assholes.

I went to eat at a diner once in New York City. I came in as a woman eating alone. The hostess on duty tried to seat me at one of their "two-person booth" tables, but I was very uncomfortable there because I have rather large breasts and the tables in these booths were bolted to the wall such that I could not comfortably increase the distance between myself and the table by pushing the table a little further away. Instead, I was in a situation where my breasts were literally hovering over/sitting on the tabletop. I hate that, not only because you feel like a public spectacle but because it's a guaranteed way to spill food on your chest when eating (which I hardly ever fail to do anyway). So I asked her if I could sit at a bigger booth, or someplace else. She became very haughty and said no, I couldn't--they always seated solo diners at their two-seater booths. It was a RULE.

I looked for someone else to ask about this, and got the attention of a guy who looked like the manager and explained the situation to him. He said of course I could sit somewhere else, and guided me to the back of the restaurant, which had one long padded bench along the back wall and a row of two-seater tables with chairs on their opposite side lined up against it. In such a situation, it's easy for the diner to adjust the distance between body and table. When I arrived, I saw that an extremely large, heavy man was already sitting at one of them, looking perfectly content there as he ate. No one had tried to squish HIM into a two-seater booth!

I sat down at the table I'd been offered...and then proceeded to wait 45 minutes to even be served coffee. No one came to my table. After a while, I began to wonder if the hostess had gotten pissed off about my going over her head to ask for a table that would make me more comfortable, and even more pissed that her manager had overriden her "rule"--and she'd told the wait staff to avoid my table as payback.

Finally, I got the attention of the manager again, and explained I'd been waiting 45 minutes for service. He took care of that, too.

I finally got my breakfast. I only hope that hostess got fired. I have all the sympathy in the world for people who work on their feet all day for little pay, but part of your job is to make the customers comfortable. And if you have a place in the restaurant where they can feel comfortable that won't cause any more trouble than to seat them anyplace else, which she did, your job is to seat them there. It really pissed me off that if I had weighed 300 pounds, she would have taken me to a seat in the back right away, but she had no sympathy for anything else that might have caused me not to want to sit in one of those two-seater booths.

[Maine-ah]

27. as a waitress, and I'm going to be perfectly honest with you

teenagers 99.9% of the time (where I work) don't tip even 15%, and that's when they actually leave you a tip. It is not an excuse to provide bad service though, and nor do I practice that. All my customers recieve the same service out of me.

[Benhurst]

20. Here's one for you from 1993:

http://www.nathannewman.org/EDIN/.race/.racefile/.may-june/Discrimination3/sec-serv.txt.html

[FVZA_Colonel]

3. Well, I guess it's possible that the members of the Annenberg Challange could have held a breakfast

meeting there, but I really don't know what the fuck McCain is talking about right now.

[Kool Kitty]

6. McCain probably doesn't know what he's talking

about, either.

[The Wielding Truth]

9. He knows. He is throwing every nasty thing he can find.

[FLyellowdog]

5. I caught that as well, but surely he wouldn't do that on nat'l tv.

Maybe he frequents Denny's?

OR maybe there's a joke of some kind floating around his offices about it and he just kind of slipped up. He's such a scumbag we'll probably never know for sure.

[rebel with a cause]

14. It is code that racist would catch and others may not.

You guys caught it because you are aware of such things and are smarter than the average viewer, but like everything else it is a message/joke sent out to his racist base. :grr: His true colors are showing through.

[FLyellowdog]

34. Did you just call me a racist? I resemble that remark. I've never been in a race in my life. LOL

[rebel with a cause]

35. No I said you were smarter than the average viewer.

Now I may have to rethink that. :rofl:

Let me clarify my statement. I understand 'white speak' so I would never call anyone that just understands it a racist, but if someone uses it, then they are going to be called a racist. Those in mccain's base that he is speaking to probably understand and speak this coded language. If they don't speak it, they probably think it or they would not be supporting him while he does these hateful things.

[DarthDem]

12. I Did Think The Reference Was Very Odd . . . .

. . . considering that McClown ought to know about Denny's huge settlements in lawsuits with African-Americans. If his remark didn't have any racist implications, though, what the hell did it mean? There's nothing inherently funny about going to Denny's. It was either a joke that fell flat or a racist gaffe. And the beauty of McCane is that you just never know.

Best probable answer: an unintended racist gaffe made by an increasingly senile man in poor control of his emotions, who got caught up in the laughs he was getting and became a little manic.

[davidpdx]

13. Because his name is McNasty and he's a racist *******

[rebel with a cause]

15. Amen and right on.

:thumbsup:

[Raine]

18. I sure that Obama has better taste in restuarants

than to eat at Dennys, especially with their history! x(

[Miss Chybil]

19. You give McCain too much credit.

Look, he didn't know Joe wasn't a real plumber, or that he wasn't really planning to buy a business, or that Obama's tax plan would really lower Joe's taxes, or even that Joe's name isn't Joe. He also didn't know Sarah Palin is a fricken' nut job and her husband is a secessionist. He didn't even know how many houses he owns. So, to think he knows the history of Denny's is a bit of a stretch.

[MrScorpio]

21. Breakfast At Denny's

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtltFfF5PhU

[Blue_Roses]

23. that was there the first thing that came to my mind

I think he caught what he said and tried to clean it up with the next comment

[MaineDem]

22. Did he really say that???? It's terribly racist!

I can't believe he'd stoop that low. With the history of Denny's and African-Americans this can be nothing but a totally racist statement.

I'm extremely appalled.

[tanyev]

24. When is the last time John and Cindy McCain went to a Denny's?

Ever?

[ecstatic]

25. hmm good catch. I didn't catch the implication there, but I'm sure his writers

knew.

[noel711]

26. There's NO Denny's in Hyde Park...

last time I looked.

There's way cooler places for brunch,
if you're an elitist or sumthin'....

[wishlist]

28. It is a racist remark, otherwise he would have said they go to Starbucks nt

[BklynChick]

29. it struck me as really odd given Denny's history

[grasswire]

31. how would John McCain know that Denny's serves a "grand slam"???

He said that with such emphasis. "He can order the GRAND SLAM"

Why would McCain say that???

[RamboLiberal]

32. Ironic - look who was head of Justice Dept Civil Rights Division

at time of Denny's lawsuit. ROFL!

Denny's, a national restaurant chain, agreed today to pay more than $54 million to settle lawsuits filed by thousands of black customers who had been refused service or had been forced to wait longer or pay more than white customers.

The new head of the civil rights division of the Justice Department, Deval L. Patrick, said it was the largest and broadest settlement under the Federal public-accommodation laws. Those laws were adopted more than 30 years ago to end segregation in restaurants and other places that serve the public.

The agreement, worked out among Government lawyers and lawyers representing Denny's and its customers, ended Federal class-action lawsuits in Baltimore and in San Jose, Calif., and a complaint in Virginia. Those actions were filed on behalf of thousands of black customers who had asserted that Denny's violated their civil rights by treating them rudely and by routinely giving preferential treatment to whites.

In one instance, a black Federal judge from Houston and his wife who had been traveling for 18 hours said they were forced to wait at a Denny's in Yreka, Calif., for almost an hour as white teen-agers taunted them and referred to them as "niggers."

In another case, six black Secret Service agents assigned to President Clinton's detail were refused a table at a Denny's in Annapolis. Md., while their white Secret Service colleagues were seated and served.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D07E3DA1F38F936A15756C0A962958260

[WA98296]

33. EXACTLY what it was, a not so thinly veiled RACIST remark.